Sea of Slaughter (41 page)

So ends the story of how the Sea of Whales became a Sea of Slaughter as, one by one, from the greatest to the least, each in turn according to its monetary worth, the several cetacean nations perished in a roaring holocaust fuelled by human avarice.

Now that there are no longer enough of them remaining to be of any significant commercial value, the fires that consumed their kinds are burning down. But it is unlikely—our instincts being what they are—that even the far-flung scattering of survivors will ever be secure from our rapacity unless, and until, they receive worldwide protection.

Surely this is the least that we can do to make atonement for the evil we have done to them.

And it
was
evil—of that, make no mistake.

Two great families of mammals have made the seas their homes. Whales are one. The other I call finfeet. It is composed of seals, walrus, and related swimmers whose hind feet have been modified into fins, or flippers. Compared to whales, finfeet are latecomers to the oceanic world; but they have nevertheless lived there for a much longer time than recognizable human beings have existed on this planet.

Finfeet are, and always have been, much better known to us than whales because most have retained close ties with the terrestrial world. The names we have given them testify to the sense of familiarity we feel: sea horse, sea cow, sea wolf, sea elephant, sea lion; these are but a few examples.

When the first European adventurers sailed into the northwestern approaches to the New World they found the seas thronged with finfeet, including those of five major kinds. One of these was the massive walrus. Two others, grey and harbour seals, lived in close association along all the coasts and were permanent residents, bearing their young on beaches and islands. The two remaining major species, harp and hood seals, lived, and still do, in a world apart. In summer they range the High Arctic seas. In winter and well into spring, they form enormous aggregations in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and just to the north of Newfoundland, where they bear their young on the drifting world of the pack ice. These are the ice seals, and they seldom voluntarily come on land.

The abundance of finfeet in aboriginal times must have been truly astounding. The ice seals alone could not have numbered less than 10 million.

All five species became grist to the mill of human greed as Europeans set about the exploitation of the northeastern seaboard. One was totally extirpated; another so reduced in numbers that, for a time, it was believed to be extinct in North America. The remaining three suffered and continue to suffer such depredation at human hands that, if no halt is made, it may well prove fatal to their survival.

There are those in authority—men entrusted by our society to husband “our animal resources”—who are, as we shall see, committed to just such ultimate destruction of the finfeet kind.

All islands are imbued with
my
stery, but few so darkly as Sable Island. Cast adrift in the thunder of the Atlantic a hundred miles off the Nova Scotian coast, it is a new-moon sliver of shining sand where no dry land has any right to be. Unseen shoals curve for many miles beyond its crescent tips, forming twin scythes that have reaped a full share of men and ships and earning the island its grim sobriquet: Graveyard of the North Atlantic.

Such is its dark side, yet when our European forebears first glimpsed its shifting shores it was a bright haven of fecund life. Here is how it might have seemed in the discovery years at the beginning of the 1500s.

It is a June day and the high sky is streaked with tendrils of cirrus cloud. A puffy nor'east breeze tells of dirty weather in the offing but, for the moment, the sun burns brazenly over this nameless island where no man has ever walked.

A milky beach hones its edge in the heavy roll of the unquiet ocean; but this gleaming scimitar is discoloured here and there by rough-textured patches, each of which is several acres in extent. Closer examination reveals that they are composed of thousands of immense, cylindrical creatures crowded so close to one another that they appear to be almost a single entity. Most are sprawled lethargically on their backs in a state of sun-drugged apathy, careless that their exposed bellies are beginning to glow a warning shade of pink.

Goggle-eyed faces, spiky whiskers, deep-wrinkled cheeks and jowls seem faintly reminiscent of a multitude of Colonel Blimps—except that each, no matter what its age or sex, carries a down-curving pair of gleaming, ivory tusks. Those gracing the 3,000-pound bulls are as long as a man's forearm and wrist-thick at the base. They glitter in the sunlight, imparting to their ponderous owners an aura of primal power suggestive of fearsome possibilities should they be roused to rage. These are walrus, tuskers of the sea.

Formidable as they may seem, there is nevertheless something endearing about these lumpen beings packing the long sweep of beach like middle-aged human holiday-makers. Perhaps it is that they are so patently enjoying life. Not all are lolling on the sands. Just beyond the roaring breakers, herds of cows lave sunburnt hides while keeping alert eyes on youngsters, sporting in the surf.

Once waterborne, these creatures are transformed into sleek and sinuous masters of another element from which, were it not for the requirements of calving and the joys of sex and sunbathing, they would have no cause ever to depart. Water is their true medium, and has been since their ancestors rejected life upon the land uncounted millions of years ago.

Measuring up to fourteen feet in length, superbly muscled, clad in a hide as tough as a suit of armour, the adults fear nothing in the oceanic world. Gregarious and amiable except when roused in defence of kith and kin, they live harmoniously as one of several far-flung tribes of the walrus nation, which in those times existed in untold numbers as far south as Cape Cod on the Atlantic shores of North America, and the Queen Charlotte Islands on the Pacific side. Plunging effortlessly through the deeps, feeding on beds of oysters, mussels, clams, and giant sea snails, or lolling in satisfied repletion on sunswept beaches, they lived an enviable life.

That is how things were with the sea tuskers some 500 years past when European man first came upon them.

A few years ago, in the museum of the Arctic and Antarctic Institute in Leningrad, I was handed an intricately carved and ancient piece of heavy bone. The Chukotkan archaeologist who was my host was playing guessing games. What did I think the object was?

“Ivory?” I hazarded. “Maybe elephant tusk... or maybe mammoth?”

“Ivory, yes. The hilt of a sword from excavations in Astrakhan on the old trade route to Persia. Fifth century, perhaps. But it is
morse
... the walrus, as you say. And did you know that in those far-off times the morse's tusks were more valuable than elephant ivory?”

I had not known, and was intrigued. So my friend showed me a ninth-century account of a Muscovite prince captured by Tatars whose ransom was set at 114 pounds of gold... or an equal weight in walrus tusks. I learned that, from well before Christ's birth until as late as AD 1600, walrus ivory was one of civilization's most valued and sought-after commodities. Compact and easily portable, the tusks were used as currency in their natural “ingot” state or were worked into precious and ornamental objects.

“The tooth of the morse,” mused my companion, “was white gold in northern Europe and much of Asia through more than 2,000 years. How strange that such a monster should have been so great a source of wealth.”

Ivory was not the only value to be derived from walrus. Inch-thick leather from the hides of old bulls is so tough it will deflect a musket-ball and offers better protection against cutting and thrusting weapons than bronze. Consequently it was the first and most expensive choice of shield makers and their warrior customers through many centuries.

The hide had other uses. A narrow strip cut spirally from a single skin would yield a rope an inch in section and as much as 100 yards in length. When treated with walrus oil, such a rope became as flexible and durable as contemporary ropes of vegetable fibre, and a good deal stronger. Walrus-hide rope early became and long remained preferred cordage and rigging for northern ships.

These same ships depended on still another walrus product: a tar-like substance produced by evaporating boiled walrus oil. This sticky black stuff was used to seal a vessel's seams and to protect her planking from the inroads of the ship-worm. The first known European vessel to complete the crossing of the North Atlantic Ocean, a
knorr
sailed by the Icelandic merchant Bjarni Herjolfsson to Newfoundland in 985, was almost certainly rigged with hvalross (whale horse) rope and sealed with hvalross tar.

Northerners were not the only men to make use of the animal. Bones found in Neolithic middens laid down in dim antiquity testify to its one-time presence as far south as the Bay of Biscay, and it seems to have still been present in the English Channel as late as the second century AD. However, as men increased in number and improved their killing skills, the toll they took of the walrus became so heavy that the tuskers gradually vanished from more southern waters. The last Baltic walrus was killed in the seventh century and, during the succeeding hundred years, tusk and hide hunters harried it to extinction in the North Sea and around the sea-girt Faeroe, Orkney, and Shetland Islands. In the ninth century, a Norwegian adventurer named Octher reported that hvalross were hardly to be found south of North Cape, Europe's polar promontory. As they grew rarer they increased in value and so were hunted harder, to such effect that by the late tenth century not even Norwegian kings could find enough walrus hide to cover the wooden shields ranged along the gunwales of their dragon-headed longships.

By the thirteenth century, hvalross of mainland Europe survived only amongst the ice fogs of the Barents Sea in the Russian Arctic. They were already becoming legendary. A clerical chronicler of those times wrote of them: “Toward [those] northern parts there are huge great fish as big as elephants which are called Morsi or Russ-morsi, perhaps from their sharp biting; for if they see any man on the sea-shore, and can catch him, they come suddenly upon him and rend him with their teeth... these fish have heads fashioned like to an Oxe and hair growing as thick as straw... They will raise themselves by their Teeth, as by ladders, to the very tops of Rocks that they may feed on the Dewie grass... They fall very fast asleep upon the Rocks, then Fisher-men make all the haste they can, and begin at the Tail and part the Skin from the Fat, and into this that is parted they put very strong cords and fasten them on the rugged Rocks or Trees. Then they throw stones at his head out of a Sling to raise him and compel him to descend, therebye stripping off the greater part of the Skin, which is fastened to the Ropes. He being therebye exhausted, fearful and half dead, he is made a rich prey, especially for his Teeth, that are very precious among the Scythians, the Moscovites, Russians and Tartars.”

Although the European walrus tribe had been reduced to little more than the stuff out of which fantastic tales are woven, walrus ivory and hides continued to appear in continental markets where they commanded ever-escalating prices. But these goods came from sources so distant they were themselves semi-mythical.

The mysterious island of Thule, which had loomed dimly on the western horizon of Europe for hundreds of years before the Christian era began, was colonized by the wide-ranging Vikings early in the ninth century. In Iceland, as they named it, they found a vast population of hvalross that they turned into white gold with such rapacity that the supply soon began to fail. So they fared farther afield into the western and northern mists to discover new tribes of walrus on the island continent of Greenland. After AD 1000, it was mainly from this outpost on the outer edge of the known world that hvalross products continued to reach European markets.

However, the Greenland walrus hunters, clinging precariously to the western rim of Europe's carousel, were unable to survive a deteriorating climate that brought an onslaught of great storms and plunging temperatures. Their settlements waned and died, and in the late 1400s the trickle of hvalross products into Europe finally failed. It was at this juncture that Europe discovered the walrus multitudes of the Western Ocean.

Who made the discovery remains unknown. Perhaps it was the Portuguese brothers Gaspar and Miguel Corte Real who in 1501 and 1502 explored the coastal waters of the northeastern seaboard of America. At any rate, a certain Pedro Reinal who sailed with them made a sea chart that shows an island called Santa Cruz lying off the Nova Scotia coast. Santa Cruz is Sable Island, and whoever found it could not have failed to note the legions of walrus for whom that curving strip of sand was home.

The twenty-mile-long island rises from the centre of Sable Island Bank, an immense submerged plateau remarkable not only for its abundant stocks of fish but for the quantities of molluscs that encrust its underwater pastures. Few shellfish beds anywhere can equal these. But one other that can do so (we will look at it later) is known to have still supported 100,000 walrus as late as the middle of the eighteenth century. We can reasonably conclude that Sable Island and its surrounding banks were home to at least that many. Early vessels passing close to the island would perforce have sailed through an ocean crowded with sleek behemoths whose tusks glistened wetly as they raised huge heads to stare in fearless wonder at the intruders.

The discovery of Sable Island's walrus legions meant the unveiling of a train oil bonanza as productive of avarice in those times as the North Sea and Alaskan oil fields have been in ours. And exploitation of it was undertaken with comparable energy... and ruthlessness.

Because the approach to Sable was exceedingly dangerous except during rare intervals of calm, and because it offered no harbours where ships could lie secure from storm, the walrus “fishery” there was fraught with risks. No matter. Ships sailed for Sable hoping to reach the island in May or early June when the greatest part of the walrus population would be hauled out on the beaches to whelp. The outward voyage might take a month or more through storm and fog, and even when the low loom of Sable's dunes was sighted, the sea-weary vessels might be forced to beat back and forth in imminent peril for days on end, awaiting a respite in the weather during which small boats could run the gamut of the roaring breakers to land the hunters and their gear. Once that was accomplished, the ships would make all haste away from the raging surf, steering for safe harbours on the mainland coasts where the crews could spend the balance of the summer fishing cod.

Those who landed on Sable would have found themselves immersed in a veritable stew of life. The surrounding waters teemed with walrus, seals, porpoises, and whales. The sky resounded to the endless flight of seabirds. A salt-water lagoon stretching down the centre of the island was alive with ducks whose nests, half-hidden under tufts of dune grass, were so numerous a man could scarcely pick his way amongst them. Lobsters, clams, herring, and mackerel swarmed in the lagoon and along the outer shores. Profligate life abounded in and over this island for, until the coming of Europeans, it had never known the hard and bloody hand of man.

Not that it was inhospitable to humankind. It harboured none of the biting flies that were the curse of the mainland of the New World. Fresh water was obtainable from rain-water ponds. Although no trees grew, a millennium's collection of driftwood lay windrowed above storm-tide level. The weather could be rough, but summer temperatures were equitable and the sun often shone. Blackberries, cranberries, and wild peas abounded. Life for a summertime visitor to Sable in the early days could have been something of an idyll. But for those who came to it for walrus oil, life was the way of death.

Iron-headed mauls and axes, double-handed stabbing spears, flensing knives, clay bricks, copper cauldrons, bundles of oaken staves, and willow withes were the major items amongst the gear perilously ferried ashore. The cauldrons were set up over firepits dug in the sand and lined with bricks. Coopers assembled staves and withes into train oil casks. Shack tents of sailcloth and driftwood sprouted in the sparse shelter of the dunes.

All was hurriedly made ready and then the fishing masters led their gangs down to the beaches—to those long, sun-gleaming beaches densely packed as far as the eye could see with serried ranks of walrus.

No first-hand description of how the slaughter was conducted during the long-ago years on Sable now exists, but we have an account from Bear Island, 300 miles north of Norway, where in 1603 a previously unknown tribe of European walrus was discovered by a far-roaming ship of the English Muscovy Company. The author of this account of what followed was a crewman named Jonas Poole.